This is no time go panic into more regulation

Monday

Mar 31, 2008 at 6:49 AMMar 31, 2008 at 6:50 AM

Steve Williams-Opinion Page Editor

Terrible things happened during the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash in 1929 and didn't end until America's industrialized war machine began cranking up at the end of the 1930s. By the end of World War II the American economy ruled the world, and except for a couple of minor economic glitches along the way, it's been getting stronger and stronger, and more and more people, both in this country and around the world, enjoy better lives because of it.

Now we're on the precipice of another of those glitches, and there are those glitches, this one brought about by the Federal Reserve's push for easier and easier money (the dollar's almost ion free fall) and some terrible credit decisions in the mortgage market over the past decade.

Bad things happened during the Great Depression. People lost their jobs, their homes, their farms, their way of life, and most importantly, their sense of security. Those were all terrible, but the worst thing that happened was that Big Government got huge. Not only did it get huge, but it became about as intrusive as any dictatorship at its worst, and all in the name of trying to "do something" to right the economic ship.

It didn't help

But the "something" didn't do anything. Only World War II righted America's economic ship; pretty nearly everything Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his march to socialism was counter-productive, particularly from an economic standpoint, and delayed our actual recovery.

It has taken America and Americans the intervening 73 years to pull back from the socialism brink, and we've only managed to do so in fits and starts.

Now, although most of us cast fearful eyes at the immediate future because of the growing financial crisis, we ought to be more afraid of what those people in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. are going to do to "save" us all from economic disaster. In other words, regulation mania has hit government, and an all-too-receptive populace is apparently willing to go along if the regulation solves the problem. In other words, panic is setting in among our political "leaders".

Making it worse

But the regulatory devices under consideration won't help; they will only make the crisis worse, and, just as happened during the Depression, delay the recovery.

The last thing we — or government — should do is panic and overcorrect. Most of us will, as we should be, start tightening our belts where we can. Meanwhile, problems in the economy didn't happen overnight and will take time to wash through the system — if they're left alone.

As we said, that's the great danger, that our basically free-market system will get tinkered with and won't be allowed to work. That's not only sad, it's pathetically short-sighted.

Among those things government is either doing or contemplating, of course, is the "stimulus" package. It won't stimulate much. Instead, we're sure, taxpayers will use the money not to go out and buy new goods and services which will create new manufacturing and service sector jobs, but will instead pay off some of those credit card loans.

Speaking of the stimulus and dumb ways to waste money, have you received your letter from the Internal Revenue Service? Not informing you that there's a problem with the tax return you filed earlier this year, of course.

No, we're talking about the letter that is informing U.S. taxpayers across the nation that they should expect a check in the mail — in May, apparently — as a result of that economic stimulus plan proposed by President George W. Bush and approved by Congress, in addition to any tax refund you may already be due after filing 2007 tax returns.

Why spend money on the postage?

To inform taxpayers that the check will be in the mail, the IRS is mailing a letter this month telling us just that. The cost? Just to send the letter? A whopping $42 million. Which proves that, unlike the rest of us who are going a little belt-tightening, the politicians are instead spending even more than they have been. And that's also pathetic.

Granted, for a government used to dealing with trillion-dollar spending plans, $42 million may not seem like much. But as the adage says, a million here and a million there and soon you're talking about real money. It's also a waste of our tax dollars.

We don't need the letter. As long as the money has already been approved, just send the checks. We all know they're coming. At least in this one little instance, quit wasting money.